Attorney accused of hiding money from tax authorities

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A Menomonee Falls attorney is accused of putting money in his trust account to hide it from tax authorities.

Raymond Clark faces 10 misconduct charges filed by the Office of Lawyer Regulation. A complaint filed Oct. 9 alleges that Clark would take money from clients for a case or payments for his work and put it into his trust account. Then, he would withdraw money from that account to pay himself.

According to the complaint, an audit done by the OLR “revealed a pattern of Clark depositing checks that represented earned fees into his trust account and then disbursing the fees back to himself over a period of time in smaller amounts …” The OLR alleges he did this to hide money from the Internal Revenue Service and the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, so it could not be taxed.

The OLR is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to suspend his law license for 15 months.

Clark graduated from Marquette University Law School in 1959. He is listed as an emeritus member of the State Bar and is in good standing.

The OLR complaint is just of several financial problems he had had in recent years. He has outstanding state and federal tax warrants stretching to 1991.

According to the complaint, Clark told the OLR that he only kept one account for his law firm.

There were also discrepancies in his reported earnings and what he put into his trust account, the complaint states. For example, in 2008, Clark reported on his federal tax forms that he took in $16,581 worth of revenue for his law firm. During that same period, he paid at least $15,841.20 to himself from the trust account.

In 2009, he said he made $9,778, but withdrew at least $12,346.81 from his trust account, according to the complaint.

In interviews with Clark, the OLR told him that “his pattern, combined with outstanding tax warrants … suggested [he] may have been intentionally hiding earned income in his trust account from the tax authorities.” Clark initially denied this, but admitted in a Feb. 14 interview that he “allowed earned fees to ‘languish’ in the trust account in order to protect them from levy by the tax authorities.”

He told investigators, according to the complaint, that he is now paying the IRS for his back taxes through Social Security payments.

The mishandling of his money affected client matters as well. According to the complaint, when representing Tina Campbell in a divorce case, Clark was supposed to make payments to certain entities to satisfy Campbell’s debts. However, he did not make the payments on time, since there was not enough money in the account. Some of that money, instead, was used to pay himself.

If the Supreme Court hands down a 15-month suspension, Clark, who refused to comment, would have to petition the justices to have his law license reinstated. Follow @eheisigWLJ